Thanks for sharing this, Matt. I’m happy that you took the time to do so considering that you don’t have to. What I mean is, in an ideal world, there should be no such thing as SEO. It is the SE’s job to bring the right users to the right sites and it is the job of webmasters to cater to the needs of the users brought into their sites by SEs. Webmasters should not be concerned of bringing the users in themselves. (aside from offsite or sponsored marketing campaigns) The moment they do, things start to get ugly because SEs would now have to implement counter-measures. (To most SEO tactics) This becomes an unending spiral. If people only stick to their part of the equation, SEs will have more time to develop algorithms for making sure webmasters get relevant users rather than to develop algorithms for combating SEOs to ensure search users get relevant results. Just do your best in providing valuable content and Google will try their best in matching you with your users. Don’t waste time trying to second guess how Google does it so that you can present yourself to Google as having a better value than you really have. They have great engineers and they have the code—you only have a guess. At most, the SEO anyone should be doing is to follow the webmasters guidelines. It will benefit all.

Internet usage around the world, especially in the wealthiest countries, has steadily risen over the past decade and it shows no signs of slowing. According to a report by the Internet trend investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, 245 million people in the United States were online as of 2011, and 15 million people connected for the first time that year. As Internet usage grows, online commerce grows with it. This means that more people are using the Internet with each passing year, and enough of them are spending money online to impact the economy in significant ways. (See also E-Commerce Marketing)

A more intelligent surfer that probabilistically hops from page to page depending on the content of the pages and query terms the surfer that it is looking for. This model is based on a query-dependent PageRank score of a page which as the name suggests is also a function of query. When given a multiple-term query, Q={q1,q2,...}, the surfer selects a q according to some probability distribution, P(q) and uses that term to guide its behavior for a large number of steps. It then selects another term according to the distribution to determine its behavior, and so on. The resulting distribution over visited web pages is QD-PageRank.[41]

A: For a couple reasons. At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise. So we started to provide other guidance that PageRank sculpting isn’t the best use of time. When we added a help page to our documentation about nofollow, we said “a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.” In a recent webmaster video, I said “a better, more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing (for example) which things to link to from your home page.” At Google I/O, during a site review session I said it even more explicitly: “My short answer is no. In general, whenever you’re linking around within your site: don’t use nofollow. Just go ahead and link to whatever stuff.” But at SMX Advanced 2009, someone asked the question directly and it seemed like a good opportunity to clarify this point. Again, it’s not something that most site owners need to know or worry about, but I wanted to let the power-SEOs know.
If Google finds two identical pieces of content, whether on your own site, or on another you’re not even aware of, it will only index one of those pages. You should be aware of scraper sites, stealing your content automatically and republishing as your own. Here’s Graham Charlton’s thorough investigation on what to if your content ends up working better for somebody else.

Matt, this is an excellent summary. I finally got around to reading “The Search” by John Battelle and it was very enlightening to understand much of the academia behind what led to the creation of Backrub.. er Google.Looking at how many times the project was almost shutdown due to bandwidth consumption (> 50% of what the university could offer at times) as well as webmasters being concerned that their pages would be stolen and recreated. It’s so interesting to see that issues we see today are some of the same ones that Larry and Sergey were dealing with back then. As always, thanks for the great read Matt!

I first discovered Sharpe years ago online. His story was one of the most sincere and intriguing tales that any one individual could convey. It was real. It was heartfelt. It was passionate. And it was a story of rockbottom failure. It encompassed a journey that mentally, emotionally and spiritually crippled him in the early years of his life. As someone who left home at the age of 14, had a child at 16, became addicted to heroin at 20 and clean four long years later, the cards were definitely stacked up against him.

I’m in the wedding industry and recently a Wedding SEO Company began touting PageRank sculpting as the missing link for SEO. So naturally I got intrigued and searched for your response to PageRank sculpting and your answer for anything SEO-related is always the same. “Create new, fresh, and exciting content, and organically the links and your audience will grow.”

We begin by gaining a sound understanding of your industry, business goals, and target audience. We follow a very formal marketing process for each social media strategy which includes in-depth discovery, market research, project planning, exceptional project management, training, consulting, and reporting. We also incorporate social media ads such as Facebook advertising into many marketing campaigns. As a top digital marketing agency we make social media recommendations that will be best for your business and offer the most engaging experience for your audience.